SUPERRESOLUTION IN CONFOCAL SCANNING MICROSCOPY .4. THEORY OF DATA INVERSION BY THE USE OF OPTICAL MASKS

In the previous papers in this series we proposed and discussed a method, based on a singular-system analysis of the low-numerical-aperture limit for improving the resolution of a confocal scanning microscope. In this paper we show that this method can be implemented by the use of a special optical mask which can be computed by this analysis. We discuss one-dimensional and two-dimensional problems both in the coherent and in the incoherent case. Some exact results obtained for one-dimensional problems are used to understand the numerical results obtained for two-dimensional problems. For the two-dimensional incoherent problem we also extend the investigation to the case of lenses with high numerical aperture.